Finland... 666 Points
April 28, 2006
 Fantastic!!! This lot, Lodi, are Finlands entry for the Eurovision Song Contest. Watch the video and be scared. Whoah! The track is called... wait for it... Hard Rock Hallelujah! And band members are: Lordi, Amen, Ox, Awa and Kita. Which I suspect is not what their Mummies and Daddies call them.
Categories: Music
Comment | Permalink
Minimal Blogging
April 27, 2006
Well, fancy that... just noticed on the Rough Trade site that, not content with a slightly famous Mum, Lily Allen is also the daughter of Keith Allen. That's not news at all now but I started composing this on the 22nd and haven't had a chance to carry on until now. That's three Blog entries in a row for Lily. I'll stop now. But she is rather good!
Should have been at Click Click Whirr tonight. Well, didn't have to be, but it would have been nice as Matt B M had gone to the trouble of warning me!
Anyhoo... turns out it's on the last Thursday of every month, at Café Cairo - which is at 88 Landor Road, SW9 9PH - as I've mentioned before. When I got a couple of facts wrong [thats Wiki's for ya!]. They do serve alcohol and time is 7:30 - 11:30. Therfore next one should be 25th May but as it's a Bank Holiday weekend they will be hosting a Special Night on Sunday 28th instead. With a "Party Vibe" apparently! I'll be there... I hope.
Must see...
Tomas Saraceno
11 May - 16 July
Daily - FREE
11:00 - 20:00
The Curve - Barbican
Saraceno has created an installation featuring a video shot from a ring of 32 cameras floating on the world’s largest salt lake, Salar de Uyuni in Bolivia. Images of the sky reflected on the lake are captured by Saraceno’s cameras and projected onto the 80-metre wall of The Curve, creating a stunning panorama in which the viewer is immersed in, and floats amongst, the clouds.
Got tickets for ULTRA: Extreme Economy in Electronic Music and Visualisation: featuring 30 minutes each from Ryoji Ikeda, Alva Noto [Carsten Nicolai], and Robert Henke aka Monolake at Tate Modern on Monday 29th May. And off to St. Ives next week to see Ellsworth Kelly at the Tate down there.
Lots to do in May then!
Categories: Music, Art, London
Comment | Permalink
Happy Easter
April 12, 2006
Been decorating all week so not quite up to speed with my mail and feeds yet, but what I have found out is...
David Mitchell has a new book, Black Swan Green , due on May 8th and Lily Allen's mum, Alison Owen, was the executive producer of Shaun Of The Dead!
And don't forget to check out my picture, Hang Your Pixels Even, from 8th - 29th April at...
BG [The Old TPG Post Building]
Oosterdokskade 3-5
1011 AD Amsterdam
As part of HYPE Amsterdam - Probably easier online if you're as far away from T'Dam as I am!
Happy Easter.
Categories: Art, Music, Books
Comment | Permalink
Kaning It
April 11, 2006
 Been listening to Lily Allen today. LDN has to be the hit of the Summer this year - Out on 7" in a couple of weeks I'm assuming there will be a bigger release later in the year... Sounds like one of those tunes that'll get played all over the Notting Hill Carnival to me. It feels sunnier already! Lily has been in the USA working with Mark Ronson [East Village Radio] who did the rework of Just by Radiohead I linked to a week or so back.
I also stumbled across Tommy Kane, via Molesknerie. Kane not only has a site crammed with fantastic art work but also has a long list of links to other artists and illustrators that will keep me quiet for weeks.
Categories: Music, Art, London
Comment | Permalink
Digital Doings
April 10, 2006
In a week when Gnarls Barkley [Cee-Lo and Danger Mouse] gets straight to No 1 purely on the strength of downloads [It's that MySpace/Arctic Monkeys things again I'll bet - Mind you, that Zane Lowe ad must have helped!]. An Anglo/Italian band Planet Funk are preparing to release their next single solely for 3G download!
So its good to know that Bleep, now the UK's largest independent download store, representing over 300 labels, will be joining forces with Rough Trade to launch their new digital service this Autumn. The launch will form part of Rough Trade's 30th anniversary celebrations.
Bleep was originally launched by Warp, who now have their own digital presence. One of the labels represented on Bleep is Mike Paradinas' Planet Mu label, blurring the lines between Electronica, Jungle and Dubstep/Grime. Check out tracks from The Gasman: This One's For You album.
Good piece on downloads and the like from the Observer and I quite like these pieces by Eiji Aramaki. Strangely organic for something he describes as "semi-automatical composing based on machine learning methods".
Categories: Music
Comment | Permalink
Believe The Hype
April 09, 2006
 From 8th - 29th April you can see this piece, Hang Your Pixels Even [by moi] at...
BG [The Old TPG Post Building]
Oosterdokskade 3-5
1011 AD Amsterdam
As part of HYPE Amsterdam
Actually the exhibition is an organic thing and works are hung on as they are submitted, so if the gallery gets full before the 3 weeks are up the earlier pieces are removed to make way for new work, so if you're over there, go early! If you aren't, all the works can be viewed online at the website [above].
Categories: Art, Web
Comment | Permalink
Hanging Out In The Toilet
April 07, 2006
 We went to Derek Mossop's Private View of his My Vanilla Life series of photographs last night. I've documented the photos in a previous post so I'll just mention the gallery in this one.
 The exhibition is in Kingston's Toilet Gallery, which was originally a 1950's Ladies lavatory, hence the name! It was opened, rather appropriately, in October 2003 by Gilbert & George and is the brainchild of Paul Stafford. Paul is currently Director of Foundation Studies in Art & Design at Kingston University and obviously a pretty proficient self-publicist.
It's a reasonable sized gallery for a one man show although anybody working on a larger scale wouldn't be suited to the space. I suppose the gallery might add a slightly seedy, [even more] voyeuristic touch to Derek's photos but I quite like that. The gallery is absolutely freezing though and, bizarrely, doesn't have a toilet! So spare a thought for Derek, who will be holed up in there for the next three weeks. Rumours that George Michael is to pay him a visit are completely unfounded. Go and see... You'll be glad you came.
 Toilet Gallery
151 Clarence Street
Kingston
April 7th - 28th
Weds - Fri: 12:00 - 18:00
Sat - 10:00 - 18:00
Sun 12:00 - 17:00
Google Map
[left: I like to watch]
Categories: Art, London, Photography
Comment | Permalink
Blooker!
April 06, 2006
No, it's not the name of a long lost Muppet! The Blooker prize celebrates a new hybrid literary form. The Lulu Blooker Prize is the world's first literary prize devoted to blooks. Books based on blogs or websites. Awarded in three categories: Fiction, Non-Fiction and Comics.
Julie Powell, a 32-year-old New Yorker, who spent a year trying to master every recipe in a book of French cookery, has become the inaugural winner of a prize devoted to books born of blogs.
Julie came up with the idea of attempting to cook all 524 recipes in Julia Child's 1961 cookbook Mastering the Art of French Cooking and chronicled her efforts online in the Julie/Julia Project. The blog led to a publishing deal and the resulting book, Julie and Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Kitchen Apartment, has sold more than 100,000 copies.
Looking forward to getting my hands on copies of...
James Holden: At The Controls
Nathan Fake: Drowning In A Sea Of Love
Ronnie Spector: The Last of the Rock Stars
Scott Walker: Drift
Categories: Music, Books, Blogging, Food & Drink
Comment | Permalink
Strangely Drawn To These Events
April 05, 2006
 There are a couple of animation related events currently on in London. There is the Pixar: 20 Years of Animation exhibition, currently running at the The Science Museum, and the Animation Art Gallery is hosting an exhibition to celebrate 35 years of the Mr. Men.
Pixar: 20 Years Of Animation
Science Museum
Exhibition Road
South Kensington
London
SW7 2DD
1st April to 10th June
Daily 10:00-18:00
The Animation Gallery
13-14 Great Castle Street
London
W1W 8LS
4th April to May 16th [I think]
Mon-Weds and Sat 10:00 - 18:00, Thurs and Fri 01:00 - 19:00
Sun 10:00 - 16:00
Categories: Art, London
Comment | Permalink
Schmap Tones
April 02, 2006
I got an e-mail from Schmap yesterday informing me that three of my photos of Dublin, up at Flickr, have been included in their new Guide... Which was nice!
The guide runs as a player that is downloaded on your PC, which strikes me as an odd concept. Not sure if it is meant to be possible to run it on a PDA or something as well but it doesn't make it particularly transportable unless you are taking a laptop on holiday with you. However all you need to do once it is installed is select which City map you want to see and away you go.
It's currently in Beta and has a GUI that to all intents and purposes looks like a Google Map on a virtual GPS unit. It has similar features to Google Earth in as much as you can snap-in the particular type of places you are searching for: Historical, restaurants, hotels etc...
Icons then appear on the central map and info on the place you select can be found in the right hand toolbar with general navigation on the left.
You can bookmark places and create your own little itinary which you could then print out or e-mail to somebody I guess.
Hyperlinks will take you to related websites, such as hotel bookings, and there is a very good feature called "Tour", which automatically scrolls through the map highlighting selected places of interest.
You can also find out the lat/long of anywhere on the map and there is a nifty little tool for measuring distances.
Nothing that actually seems to give directions as far as I can see though.
Seems Douglas Coupland has a new book due this summer. JPod continues where Microserfs left off in 1995.
I haven't read God Hates Japan, Hey! Nostradamus or Eleanor Rigby yet.
|
|  Apparently, if you fancy some polyphonic ringtones you can create them in iTunes. From the iTunes menu select Preferences, click Advanced and select the Importing tab. For Import Using select MP3 Encoder and for Setting select Custom. On the custom window, select 64 kbps, 22.050 kHz, Mono. Make sure Variable Bit Rate and Smart Encoding are UNCHECKED and click OK twice to save. Select a song to convert. 30 seconds or less will do. You can crop it to start at the chorus. To crop, right click the song and select Get Info, select the Options tab, change the Start Time and Stop Time to the part you want. Right click on the song and select Convert Selection to MP3. The converted file is saved to your iTunes Library. Right click the new file and select Convert ID3 Tags, check ID3 Tag Version, select None and click OK. Transfer it from the Library to your phone. Via Freeringers |
Categories: Music, Web, Books
Comment | Permalink
|
|
